A variety of electrical wire processing machines are used in industry for automatically cutting insulated wire into pieces of uniform length and for stripping the insulation off the ends of the wire segments. Wire processing machines typically demand wire at rates of 1 to 6 meters per second. At these demand rates, it is virtually impossible to pull wire directly off of a reel fast enough. Moreover, many wire processing machines do not have very great gripping power nor pulling ability on the wire so the force of pulling wire directly off of a reel results in wire length inconsistency and stripped length inconsistency. The excessive pulling force necessary to rotate the reel results in the wire slipping in the processing machine's feeding system and sometimes results in the wire stretching and breaking. All of the problems that arise as a result of not prefeeding wire to the processing machine with constant tension in the wire become greater when very small gauge wire is being processed. Small gauge wires are easily stretched and broken when very little tension force is developed in them.